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How Do You Say ‘Billionaire’ in Esperanto?

Alison Leigh Cowan/The New York TimesGeorge Soros holding his father’s memoir on Wednesday. The man in the poster is L. L. Zamenhof, Esperanto’s creator.

For a small group of linguists, scholars, and dreamers who have become accustomed to having their invitations overlooked, it was no small thing when George Soros, the billionaire, walked into the room to celebrate with them.

Yet there he was Wednesday night at their symposium, doling out savory morsels about the object of their fancy: Esperanto, a century-old language fashioned in the almost evangelical belief that giving the world a common, easy-to-learn second language would reduce conflict.

Though it never caught on as widely as its inventor, L. L. Zamenhof, hoped and did little to tamp down two world wars, Esperanto still has its followers and fans. A bit messianic themselves, they get a charge learning about the latest literary find or clever Esperanto-infused rap lyric and enjoy replaying for newcomers the scene in “Incubus,” the 1966 cult classic, in which William Shatner seduces a beautiful conquest, not in Klingon, but in Esperanto.

Transcending national boundaries and bridging cultures is the whole idea. “The Koran in Esperanto is one of our nicest works,” said Neil Blonstein, the retired teacher who runs the Universal Esperanto Association and organized Wednesday’s symposium.

Consider it no coincidence, then, that the symposium took place across the street from the United Nations, 151 years to the day that Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof of Bialystok in what is now Poland was born.

An attentive crowd of 75 participants had just finished screening a new documentary about Esperanto and hearing about a new English translation of the memoir that Mr. Soros’s father, Tivadar, had published in Esperanto in 1923 about the group escape he had led three years earlier from a prisoner of war camp in eastern Russia.

At the lectern, Mr. Soros filled in some details of the group’s escape and fitful trek through Siberia. “The plan was to build a barge — well, not exactly a barge, a raft — and drift down to the ocean, except his geography was not very good, and he did not realize all the rivers led to the Arctic Ocean,” Mr. Soros said. “So as it got colder, they all had to get off.”

He also recounted what it was like growing up in Budapest in the 1930s and ’40s in a home where Esperanto was spoken, making him one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet. “This story was very much part of my childhood,” he said, holding up the newly translated memoir.

His father picked up Esperanto in his 20s and helped start “Literatura Mondo,” a literary journal that published works in Esperanto, in Budapest when he returned from his Russia. Poets and other practitioners of the new language frequented his house, and when the 17-year-old George Soros left Budapest to seek his fortune in England in 1947, he said, “one of the first things I did was seek out the Esperanto Society in London” as a friendly refuge.

“It was a very useful language,” Mr. Soros said, “because wherever you went, you found someone to speak with.”

Courtesy of Mondial BooksThe literary magazine that George Soros’s father helped start in Budapest in 1922 to publish works in Esperanto.

The memoir, whose original title was “Modernaj Robinzonoj,” evoking modern Robinson Crusoes, was published in installments in Tivadar Soros’s literary magazine in 1923. Reissued in English by Mondial, the work has been retitled “Crusoes in Siberia.” With the benefit of experience, the author actually counsels his readers in the introduction to “never dream of becoming Robinson Crusoe” lest they share his fate of wandering waywardly in Siberia.

Despite its age and habit of mentioning places that are hard to locate on maps, the memoir was not that difficult to translate, according to Humphrey Tonkin, the Esperanto scholar who accepted the challenge at the request of the Soros family.

A former president of the University of Hartford and teacher of humanities, he was rather fearless having already produced Esperanto versions of two of Shakespeare’s plays — “Henry V,” complete with its St. Crispin’s Day speech, and “The Winter’s Tale,” with its memorable stage direction involving a bear: “Eliras, sekvata de urso.”

Truth be told, he said, Soros and Shakespeare were both child’s play compared with Winnie the Pooh, whose style of wordplay was hard to capture.

Greeted warmly by audience members after the presentations, Mr. Soros, 80, told one cluster of admirers, “I should have told the story of how my father became an Esperantist.”

Urged to put it on the record, he obliged. “The new camp commander in the prison camp arrived, and he was an Esperantist,” Mr. Soros said. “He asked thousands of prisoners if there were any Esperantists among them. There were three. So he invited them for the weekend and feasted them. After that, everyone started learning it.”

Gently, Professor Tonkin told Mr. Soros that he thought another theory was more likely to be accurate but understood how Mr. Soros’s version “makes a much better story.”

As a young Reuters reporter at the United Nations in the mid-1960s, I covered an Esperanto press conference, somewhere on the East Side, aimed at promoting the language. I was the only reporter to show up. Since I had never heard of Esperanto before getting the assignment that morning, it was a journalistic adventure to put it lightly–about as challenging as the luncheon speech on another occasion by a prominent Japanese businessman whose translator got drunk and might as well have been speaking Esperanto.

I believe what he meant was that Zamenhof hoped that Esperanto would become a world “auxiliary language” that would eventually be a required subject in all countries. His dream was that all reasonably educated people would be able to communicate with each other in Esperanto, regardless of what anybody’s national language was.

Journalists usually ignore Esperanto and Esperanto speakers. Once in a blue moon one of you decides to write an article about the language and what it stands for. Should we be grateful, when this happens? Well, that depends on the article. Reading this particular one I felt far from grateful because of its sarcastic undertones.

i always get tickled when i learn that certain people speak esperanto, like the time i saw the film incubus and saw william shattner speaking it the whole movie! and now, soros.

once i organized a language festival in france, and the language of honor, believe it or not, was the gipsy language of france. to my surprise, the man who published the european dictionary of this language, was also a fluent esperanto speaker.

It is worthwhile to mention that even the surname of Mr. Soros is in Esperanto! It is the future tense of the verb “to soar”. The original surname, changed by Tivadar, was Schwartz.

Wow, how did I miss this symposium? It was chaired by Thomas Eccardt, who, twenty years ago, was my first teacher. I used to be a member of the Esperanto Society of New York; but I let this membership lapse. Maybe it would be good to rejoin!

Nice reading, and I like the undertones… they’re funny. I have been to NY once and I had the opportunity to talk to Neil Blonstein, who is a great man. Of course we did it in Esperanto! But I would like to say he doesn’t run the Universal Esperanto Association, whose HQ is in the Netherlands. However, I know he is an important contact in the US and helps UEA as a local “leader”.

I agree about the point Esperanto is not a widely known language, but it’s no longer a simple project and it does have history and culture. It makes interesting to learn the language, to know how difficult was/is to help the idea about a “neutral” auxiliary language (in its most positive sence), specially during the wars. There are many histories behind the Esperanto history that derserve a “memoir”. Greetings from Brazil (and sorry for any mistake)!

I believe your approach to Esperanto was misled.
As an Esperanto speaker myself, I was disappointed to read the article, for it could have been much more informative, and less sarcastic.
It portrays Esperanto-speakers as naive dreamers, and the language as a failure.
The fact that Soros speaks it seems like a mere amuzing curiosity, an excentricity.

The fact that it is not yet widely spoken does not mean Esperanto has failed. It’s quite the opposite, actually: it only has 123 years of existence, and is among the 100 most spoken languages! The government of China endorses it! I talk to people from all over the world in Esperanto, on the internet! And today, people have online resources to study, people to speak to, songs to hear, books to read… those things were harder to find just a few years ago. The future of Esperanto seems very bright, I hope, for the sake of all non-English-speaking-countries natives.

Would Esperanto help reduce world conflicts? I don’t know, although it would be wonderful if it did.
What I do know is that Esperanto is a more practical means of communication between people of different nationalities than national languages. I am a scientist, from Brazil, and I have attended a few international conferences. I have seen very bright people being ridiculed because they were not able to communicate well in English. While English remains the international language, natives will always have an advantage.
Besides, English is very difficult to learn. Asians, particularly, seem to have great difficulty in learning it. Esperanto was specifically constructed to be easier than any other language. While it took me years to learn English, and I still do not feel confident to speak it with natives and feel very dumb when I do so, it took me less than one year to become fluent in Esperanto, and I didn’t hear Esperanto nearly as often as English.

But maybe that’s the agenda: make Esperanto seem like something silly, to keep non-natives of English-speaking countries seeming dumb next to natives, so you still have an unfair advantage over other peoples.
I like to think that’s not the case. Does that make me a naive dreamer?

The reserved, almost sarcastic tone of the report, as some of the comments, demonstrate that even educated persons, how believe they know something about Esperanto, don’t really understand this linguistic, cultural and social phenomenon, or are misinformed or prejudiced about it. For example, the statement that Soros was “one of the few native speakers in the room, if not the planet.”. Being over a decade the chairman of the family-commission “Rondo Familia” ( //uea.org/rondo_familia/index.html) of the World Esperanto Organization (//uea.org/info/angla.html), I believe I am competent enough to dissent: the number of esperanto-speaking families is at least a thousand (when the bulletin was still being sent in paper form Rondo Familia had some 500 addresses, and its current web-bulletin Familia Esperanto (for example //www.claude.rouget.org/eo/FE46.pdf ) has typically 2000 downloads. No to mention, this is merely a tenth of a percent of the estimated number of Esperanto speakers.

I am an Esperanto speaker, but I’m somewhat perplexed by the comments of other Esperanto speakers on here.

There is no sneering tone, or if there is, it’s very mild. The article minimally talks about Esperanto. This isn’t an article about Esperanto specifically; it’s an article about the unveiling of an English translation of a book written in Esperanto by George Soros’ father.

What could anybody possibly have to complain about this article? All it does is tell us about the unveiling of a book.

A journalist writing about Esperanto has a rather difficult job. At first he or she probably does not know a lot about the subject: 120 Esperanto books per year? 138.000 articles in the wikipedia? More than 30 schools in Burundi where Esperanto is tought? Three big chinese sites in Esperanto, one of them with five to ten daily news ( //esperanto.china.org.cn , //esperanto.cri.cn and //www.espero.com.cn )? All this is usually not known to the public or to journalists. A lot of work is it to learn all this for just one article.

A second point is the problem with the public perception of Esperanto. A lot of people think that Esperanto is dead or at least a failure. So if the journalist writes, that they are wrong, he or she has much to do to defend this point of view. This would cost a lot of time. Much easier it is to be a bit sarcastic.

I don’t know if you think the fax invention to be a failure. I don’t think so. But it was invented in 1843 and in 1966, 123 years later, it was not used very much. One could think it to be a failure, as many people do think about Esperanto today, 123 years after its publication. Maybe it is a bit early to judge about the perspectives of Esperanto…

But, anyway, I don’t speak Esperanto because of its perspectives but because I know hundreds of nice people speaking Esperanto in dozens of countries. That is what mainly gets me to enjoy speaking Esperanto. The fact that I feel at home when speaking Esperanto because it is much easier, is another important point.

I thank the 21 people for their previous comments, and many accurate corrections of the article by Alison Leigh Cowan. As I have already praised the author personally for coming to the Zamenhof to Soros Symposium with her daughter, who is writing another report on Esperanto for her private high school, I will simply wait to hear about that slightly corrected report. The Esperanto community hopes that the New York Times will return to reporting on Esperanto, as it did decades ago, many times a year and not just once or twice a year.

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